History of Burger Highlife Music

Excelsior Orchestra surviving members in 1959

Fusion popular music developed in Ghana during the 19th and early 20 century from a fusion of three elements: the indigenous African, the European and the New World music of the Black Diaspora. As the imported influences first came to West Africa via European and American ships, early popular music styles grew up in the coastal areas, before moving island.

Adaha brass-band music and Fanti Osibisaaba music

West African regimental Brass Band ca. 1900

Although the term ‘highlife’ was not coined until the 1920’s it existed before then under various names and its creation occurred as a blending of local African and foreign music in three imported contexts: the coastal military-fort brass bands, the port music of seamen and fishermen, and the local dance orchestras of the western-educated and Christianized African elites of coastal towns such as Accra, Cape Coast and Winneba. Let us take each of these in turn.

The first was the local Adaha brass-band music of the Fanti coast that appeared in the 1880’s, triggered by the regimental bands of six thousand West Indians soldiers who were stationed at Cape Coast and El Mina Castle by the British colonialists. Adaha music subsequently spread like wildfire throughout southern Ghana. And for those small towns and villages that could not afford expensive brass instruments, a ‘poorman’s’ drum-and-voice version called konkoma (or konkomba) developed in the 1930’s that spread as far eastwards as Nigeria.

The second early form of highlife was Fanti Osibisaaba music that combined local percussion instruments with the guitar and accordion of sailors. Particularly important were the Kru seamen of Liberia who, in the early 20th century, pioneered Africanised cross-fingering guitar techniques on the high seas. These became a seminal influence not only on Ghanaian highlife, but also on the Maringa of Sierra Leone, the Juju music of western Nigeria and ‘dry’ guitar music of Central Africa (via the port of Mutadi)

Palm Wine Music

Palmwine box guitarist in palmwine distillery Somanya, 1998

Coastal Fanti Osibisaaba highlife percolated into the rural hinterland of Ghana where, during the 1930’s, it fused with the music of the traditional Akan ‘seprewa’ harp-lute: creating a more rootsy style of highlife called ‘odonson’, Akan ‘blues’ or ‘palm-wine music’. During the 1920’s to 40’s many records of these early guitar highlife styles (by Jacob Sam/Kwame Asare, Mireku, Appiah Adjekum, etc.) were released by western companies such as Zonophone, Columbia, Odeon and HMV. During the early 1950’s highlife guitar bands incorporated dance-band instruments (double-bass, trap-drums) and became linked to a local Ghanaian form of popular theatre known as the ‘concert party’. E.K Nyame was the outstanding pioneer of this development and his records also became popular in Nigeria, particularly in the east.

Ballroom and Ragtime Dance

Excelsior Orchestra surviving members 1959

The third type of highlife evolved from the large ballroom and ragtime dance orchestras formed from 1914 (like the Excelsior Orchestra and Jazz Kings of Accra, the Winneba Orchestra and the Rag-a-jassbo of Cape Coast). Indeed the name ‘highlife’ was coined in this high-class context; by the poor people who gathered around the posh dancing clubs that began orchestrating local street-tunes in the 1920’s. One such highlife orchestra, the Cape Coast Sugar Babies, made a sensational tour of Nigeria in 1937.